Do you consider to add support for ICU (SQLITE_ENABLE_ICU) in feature?

[pavelpoley]

Do you consider to add support for ICU (SQLITE_ENABLE_ICU) in future?

[simolus3]

I believe that option adds a dependency on the ICU library as well, which is fairly large. So I don't think enabling this would be a reasonable default.

Is there a particular feature of the ICU flag that you're looking for? Also, which platforms are you interested in? We could perhaps look into supporting a subset of that or point you to custom extensions for that.

[pavelpoley]

I use Kotlin SDK on Android platform.

I need ICU because the default SQLite LIKE implementation is ASCII-only, so it breaks as soon as you deal with real user text. Without ICU:

LIKE 'cafe%' doesn’t match "café"
Case-insensitive search fails for many languages
Unicode normalization differences aren’t handled
Non-Latin characters compare incorrectly

My app stores user-entered fields in many languages, so search must be Unicode-aware. ICU gives me proper case folding + accent-insensitive matching so users get correct results when typing “cafe”, “Cafe”, “CAFÉ”, etc.

I don’t need the full ICU feature set — just enough for reliable Unicode LIKE behavior.
The default Android sqlite supports this feature.

[pavelpoley]

Without this I will need to duplicate a "lower" column to every searchable column.

[pavelpoley]

Any update?

[stevensJourney]

Thanks for digging into this and sharing the details!

We haven’t had time to investigate the Android ICU setup yet, but there may be a practical path here.

On Android, PowerSync’s default driver uses AndroidX’s BundledSQLiteDriver, which supports loading SQLite extensions. If ICU can be packaged as a loadable SQLite extension for Android, you may be able to create your own BundledSQLiteDriver and register both extensions:

• the PowerSync extension: libpowersync.so / sqlite3_powersync_init
• the ICU extension: for example libsqliteicu.so / sqlite3_icu_init

The default DatabaseDriverFactory(context) creates its own internal driver, so it doesn’t currently give you a hook to add another extension to that specific instance. But you might be able to create your own configured BundledSQLiteDriver, wrap it in a custom PersistentConnectionFactory, and pass that to PowerSyncDatabase(...).

If ICU cannot be used as a loadable extension in your Android setup, the fallback would be to use com.powersync:common with a fully custom SQLite build/driver that has ICU compiled in.

We haven’t tested the ICU-specific packaging/build steps ourselves yet, so treat that part as guidance rather than a confirmed recipe. But architecturally/theoretically, a custom configured SQLite driver/factory could potentially help.